With the escalation of global crisis situations and natural disasters, emergency planning and response is becoming even more important to avoid catastrophic and unintended consequences including rising recovery costs, delayed response times, increased injuries, and loss of life. Now approaching its second year, Georgia Tech’s Health and Humanitarian Logistics Certificate Program has scheduled courses starting Jan. 2013 to train and educate professionals in this critical area.

The executive education certificate program entails three classes designed to help practitioners from non-governmental organizations, government, military, and industry who are active in and want to improve humanitarian operations through logistics and supply-chain efforts. This includes hands-on training to help prepare, respond, and recover from war, famine, infectious diseases, man-made, and natural disasters such as tornadoes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.

“Hurricane Sandy is a good example of how multiple municipalities, government and non-government agencies need to plan together and respond to a crisis,” said Pinar Keskinocak, professor and co-director of the Center for Humanitarian Logistics, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. “Careful planning during the pre-disaster stage combined with an effective post-disaster response, supported through communication and collaboration, significantly reduces the negative impact on the population as well as economic losses.”

Course topics include demand management and forecasting, procurement, inventory management, distribution, network design, strategies for allocating limited resources, collaboration and coordination, and measuring and evaluating system performance.

Upon completion of the certificate, participants are able to develop strategies for the management and allocation of scarce resources, deliver best practices for improving humanitarian relief efforts, and ultimately transform the humanitarian sector through increased planning and strategic decision making.

Georgia Tech launched the Health and Humanitarian Logistics Certificate Program in the fall of 2011, with the first class starting in January 2012, to support a variety of organizations that want to provide additional staff education as well as hire highly qualified individuals in the areas of logistics and supply-chain management. Participants who attended the first two courses in 2012 have lived or worked in more than 25 countries around the world.

“I learned a lot from colleagues who represent other fields and countries. Having participants with various backgrounds and from different fields was an incentive for fruitful discussions,” said Simplice Kamdem Takoubo, from USAID/Benin who participated in the certificate program in early 2012. “The course provided me with new skills that I use daily in my job to increase the efficiency of U.S. Government support in achieving our country’s goals.”

The Health and Humanitarian Logistics Certificate program includes the following courses:

• Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations - Next course: Jan. 16-17, 2013
• Tactical Decision Making and Public Health and Humanitarian Response – Next course: May 8-10, 2013
• Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response – Next course: Sept. 11-13, 2013

A limited number of scholarships are available for participants from non-governmental organizations and/or from developing countries. All courses are offered at Georgia Tech Professional Education, which is located at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center in Midtown Atlanta. For more information about the certificate program or to register, visit: http://www.pe.gatech.edu/humlog-training

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